This Week in Metal News History: 2002

Like many of you, what keeps me up at night are thoughts like “What happened in the metal world on the first week of December in 2002?” Sleep easy friends, because I gathered the best of the best.

True ‘murican Billy Milano (S.O.D) slammed Serj Tankian and Tom Morello for being anti-American pieces of shit for criticizing President Bush. He used the whole “you became successful because of America, so you’re not allowed to criticize it” defense. He also included this gem of a comment:

Everyone has the right to an opinion in these matters — it’s what makes our country so great. But formulate your opinions without being a hypocrite about it. Christopher Reeve (Superman) only cared about stem cell research after his injury. Again — how convenient! Does anyone see a trend?

Motorhead drummer Mikkey Dee had some crude remarks for Hammerfall, calling them Helloween, Iron Maiden, and King Diamond ripoffs. But he’s also friends with some of them. So he’s happy they are successful, but not sure how they got there? I’m not sure where he was going with his argument.

So I’m glad for Magnus, and I’m glad for Anders. And Stefan [Elmgren] is a good guy, the bald guitar player, he’s good, but [Hammerfall vocalist] Joacim [Cans] and [guitarist] Oscar [Dronjak], they can suck my cock. Because they really think they’re god’s gift to the planet…

A Guns N’ Roses concert turned into a riot when the venue announced that they would not perform due to “illness”. The worst part is that the crowd was just standing there for two hours after the second supporting act finished. At least they got to see CKY. I found this picture of the trashed arena:

Holy shit. Now this is a good find. I’m just going to post the full quoted text and let you admire it:

“The great thing about Slipknot is it is one of those bands that if it hangs out too long, it will not be cool at all,” Taylor said. “So we do what we do with Slipknot. I think Slipknot has one more album in it, and then we’ll call it a day. ‘Cause if we overstay our welcome, people are going to start to turn on it. Stone Sour, on the other hand, I think, has 10 or 15 years in it, just for the fact that we can do anything. The bad thing about Slipknot is we kind of painted ourselves into a corner, with Stone Sour all bets are off.”

Some additional quicky news-bites:

Temporary Misfits frontman Michale Gravestried to start a new band. At the time it was unnamed, but would later be called Gotham Road, you know, that band we all definitely know.